Sugar Junkie?

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You wake up from a sound sleep, mouth dry, stomach rumbling. You know you probably shouldn’t, but your stomach and your taste buds are telling you otherwise. Finally you succumb, roll out of bed, and head for the kitchen to satisfy one of your well-established vices: your sweet tooth.

Of course, we all have cravings, and we all have our own tricks of how to tamp down our seemingly insatiable appetites, including giving into them every once in a while. And once the craving’s been satisfied, many of us will half jokingly compare our urges to drugs, as the pleasurable qualities of these savory morsels can seem addictive, whether our “fix” comes in the form of chocolate, doughnuts, ice cream or cookies. But as the old saying goes, every joke has its truth, and according to a recent study, sugar has been shown to be more addictive than cocaine!

Cocaine is currently the most abused illegal drug in America. In lab tests studies, when lab rats were given the choice between different drugs and could retrieve them by pressing against a bar, the rats consistently opted for the cocaine over the alternative. This is particularly relevant given that humans show similar traits, doing anything and everything to get their “fix” to satisfy that urge. So, when scientists go so far as to say that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, that’s really saying something.

Published in the journal PLoS ONE, an international online journal that’s peer reviewed, researchers from the University of Bordeaux (France) gave lab rats two mutually exclusive options for sustenance: water that was sweetened with the artificial sweetener saccharin—the calorie free sweetener found in many foods, diet sodas and chewing gum on the market today—or intravenous cocaine, 94 percent of the rats opted for the sweetened water over the cocaine! What’s more, even when the dosage of cocaine was increased, or if the rats were already “high” on cocaine, which generally indicates an increased desire for more cocaine, the overwhelming majority still chose the sweetened water over more cocaine.

What explains this? It’s too early to know for sure, but researchers translate the findings as a sort of microcosm of how sugar saturated society has become. As they point out in the introduction of their study, refined sugars are a relatively new phenomenon, virtually absent from the diets of our predecessors. As such, they believe this sugar saturation effect has caused our taste buds to adapt to its taste, leaving us hungry for more sugary treats to quench our sweet tooth. Regularly consuming these kinds of foods send signals to the brain they call “supranormal,” which leads us to take on the characteristics that define addiction (e.g. lack of self control, inability to stop, etc.).

Yes, I’m sure you’re already well aware that foods high in sugar aren’t good for you. Yet these same foods are causing the epidemic in America today that is obesity. This study hammers home like never before how important it is to get a handle on your sweet tooth now—before addiction settles in.